The Normative Turn in Enactive Theory: An Examination of Its Roots and Implications

Barrett, Nathaniel F.

doi:10.1007/s11245-015-9355-y

Cited by 28 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In doing this, we make headway on addressing some of the more interesting criticisms of enaction, those that indicate where enactive thinking needs to go next, rather than insist we keep using the same worn-out map. Some of them are: that enactive thinking needs phenomenological and existential thickness (de Haan 2020), that it needs a better account of responsibility (van Grunsven 2018), of normativity (Bickhard 2016), and more particularly, of positive norms (Barrett 2017). Without having space to go into these criticisms here, I suspect that they turn around and can be responded to by looking at things through the lens of something that is present but remains largely inexplicit in Linguistic Bodies, and that is the problem of letting be.…”

Section: Need For a Different Epistemologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Loving and knowing: reflections for an engaged epistemology

Jaegher

2019

Phenom Cogn Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In search of our highest capacities, cognitive scientists aim to explain things like mathematics, language, and planning (and while explaining them, they often imagine computers at work). But are these really our most sophisticated forms of knowing? In this paper, I point to a different pinnacle of cognition. Our most sophisticated human knowing, I think, lies in how we engage with each other, in our relating. Cognitive science and philosophy of mind have largely ignored the ways of knowing at play here. At the same time, the emphasis on discrete, rational knowing to the detriment of engaged, human knowing pervades societal practices and institutions, often with harmful effects on people and their relations. There are many reasons why we need a new, engaged-or even engaging-epistemology of human knowing. The enactive theory of participatory sense-making takes steps towards this, but it needs deepening. Kym Maclaren's (2002) idea of letting be invites such a deepening. Characterizing knowing as a relationship of letting be provides a nuanced way to deal with the tensions between the knower's being and the being of the known, as they meet in the process of knowing-and-being-known. This meeting of knower and known is not easy to understand. However, there is a mode of relating in which we know it well, and that is: in loving relationships. I propose to look at human knowing through the lens of loving. We then see that both knowing and loving are existential, dialectic ways in which concrete and particular beings engage with each other.

show abstract

Section: Need For a Different Epistemologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Loving and knowing: reflections for an engaged epistemology

Jaegher

2019

Phenom Cogn Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…An organism actively brings about its own physical existence, and it is this internal relationship between doing and being that makes the organism a being that is concerned with what it is doing, in particular with its continued self-preservation [36]. Of course, this is just an initial sketch and more has to be said about how the enactive approach could account for norms that are not related to the organism's need to avoid dying [37,38], for instance by developing detailed accounts of additional processes of self-generation that are hierarchically decoupled from metabolism [23]. Nevertheless, a fundamental worry would remain: to what extent are we justified in claiming that the organism's being is something actively done, rather than merely passively undergone, if all of its unfolding processes are completely prespecified by a deterministic universe?…”

Section: The Problem Of Meaning In Ai and Roboticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Problem of Meaning in AI and Robotics: Still with Us after All These Years

Froese

Taguchi

2019

Philosophies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this essay we critically evaluate the progress that has been made in solving the problem of meaning in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. We remain skeptical about solutions based on deep neural networks and cognitive robotics, which in our opinion do not fundamentally address the problem. We agree with the enactive approach to cognitive science that things appear as intrinsically meaningful for living beings because of their precarious existence as adaptive autopoietic individuals. But this approach inherits the problem of failing to account for how meaning as such could make a difference for an agent's behavior. In a nutshell, if life and mind are identified with physically deterministic phenomena, then there is no conceptual room for meaning to play a role in its own right. We argue that this impotence of meaning can be addressed by revising the concept of nature such that the macroscopic scale of the living can be characterized by physical indeterminacy. We consider the implications of this revision of the mind-body relationship for synthetic approaches.

show abstract

“…In that way, those situations that contribute to the conservation of its metabolic identity are viewed by the system as “intrinsically good ,” while those that challenge its subsistence as “intrinsically bad ” (140). Adaptivity thereby opens a normative dimension grounded on the metabolic organization of the autonomous system (but see Barrett, 2017 for a critical perspective). Moreover, only by being able to regulate its coupling with the environment according to some self-generated norms, an autonomous system can be regarded as a cognitive agent , i.e., “a self-constructed unity that engages the world by actively regulating its exchanges with it for adaptive purposes that are meant to serve its continued viability” (Di Paolo, 2005, p. 443).…”

Section: An Enactive Approach To Habitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Under this approach, our sense of well-being can be understood “as manifestations of the relative coherence of a self-organized form of identity” (Barrett, 2017, p. 434). Let us think of a person—Alice—who is a professional cello player and an amateur mountain climber.…”

Section: An Enactive Approach To Habitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Enactive Approach to Habits: New Concepts for the Cognitive Science of Bad Habits and Addiction

Ramírez-Vizcaya

Froese

2019

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition. We review the enactive approach and highlight how it moves beyond the traditional stalemate by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns. Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. We identify a potential shortcoming of this enactive account with respect to bad habits, since self-maintenance of a habit would always be intrinsically good. Nevertheless, this is only a problem if, following the mainstream perspective on habits, we treat habits as isolated modules. The enactive approach replaces this atomism with a view of habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. Accordingly, we propose to define a bad habit as one whose expression, while positive for itself, significantly impairs a person’s well-being by overruling the expression of other situationally relevant habits. We conclude by considering implications of this concept of bad habit for psychological and psychiatric research, particularly with respect to addiction research.

show abstract

The Normative Turn in Enactive Theory: An Examination of Its Roots and Implications

Cited by 28 publications

References 22 publications

Loving and knowing: reflections for an engaged epistemology

Loving and knowing: reflections for an engaged epistemology

The Problem of Meaning in AI and Robotics: Still with Us after All These Years

The Enactive Approach to Habits: New Concepts for the Cognitive Science of Bad Habits and Addiction

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About